Life in a Bind – BPD and me

My therapy journey, recovering from Borderline Personality Disorder and Generalized Anxiety Disorder. I write for welldoing.org , for Planet Mindful magazine, and for Muse Magazine Australia, under the name Clara Bridges. Listed in Top Ten Resources for BPD in 2016 by goodtherapy.org.

Tag Archives: the good therapists


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Twitter chat 6 March: Connecting in therapy – do touch and love have a place?

It’s been ten months since psychotherapist Alison Crosthwait and I held a Twitter chat on the subject of therapy breaks; we said then that we enjoyed it so much we would do another one, and finally, we’ve set a date, time and subject!

Our next chat will be called ‘Connecting in therapy – do touch and love have a place?‘  and it will take place on Monday 6 March at 9pm GMT/4pm EST. We will be using the hashtag #therapyconnection.

I believe these are difficult and contentious topics, for both therapists and clients, and I’m very much looking forward to discovering Alison’s take on them. From a personal perspective, they are subjects I have struggled with in my own therapy, and touch, in particular is a ‘live issue’ for me at the moment. But I won’t be bringing my therapy into the chat – the aim of these chats is that they are an ‘equal’ exchange of views, looking at a subject from different perspectives. They are about therapy, but they are not therapy, and both Alison and I are careful to avoid ‘falling into’ our respective roles of therapist and client, which, as I personally discovered during our last chat, is a real temptation!

We would love for you to join us in our chat, and let us know your thoughts, whether you are a therapist or a client. Please do just ‘turn up’, even if you feel more comfortable observing rather than joining in. If you’re interested in the chat but will not be around during that time, we will be publishing a ‘transcript’ using ‘Storify’, shortly after the chat.

We look forward to seeing you there!


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Twitter chat: #therapybreak – what does it mean to you?

I am very excited about the fact that Alison Crosthwait (from ‘The Good Therapists‘) and I will be hosting a Twitter chat next Monday 25 April, at 9pm BST/4pm EST, on the subject of therapy breaks, and we would love it if you could join us – whether you are a therapist, a therapy client, both or neither! The hashtag we will be using for the chat is #therapybreak (nothing beats obvious!).

We chose the subject of therapy breaks for a number of reasons, including the fact that many people will recently have experienced such a break over the Easter holidays. We were looking for a subject that would be of interest both to therapists and clients, and was broad enough to allow discussion to range over a number of different themes. We thought about our most popular blog posts, which for Alison centre around change, and for me centre around attachment, including attachment to a therapist. We realised that thinking about therapy breaks provided the perfect opportunity to explore both areas, as such breaks can be the cause of considerable distress for clients who may experience feelings of loss, abandonment, or exclusion; but they can also be very powerful opportunities for reflection, consolidation, and change. Speaking personally, as a client, I have experienced both these aspects of a therapy break and I am intrigued to hear what Alison has to say on the subject, both from a therapist’s perspective, but also as a client herself. Other than agreeing the subject of the chat, Alison and I have decided to keep each other in the dark regarding the questions we would like to raise – we thought it would be more interesting and spontaneous that way (and I quite like the idea of us surprising each other!). And of course it would be great to be surprised by all the questions you might bring as well, if you are able to join us.

Alison and I discovered that we enjoyed each other’s writing and that our interests are complementary – and I think it’s fair to say that as therapist and client respectively, we share an interest in hearing ‘the other perspective’ in writing – though I tend to feel that often as ex-clients themselves, therapists have rather an advantage here, in terms of understanding how it feels to sit in the ‘other chair’…..

We are greatly looking forward to this ‘little experiment’, and have a couple of other ideas up our sleeve if it goes well. If you have an interest in the topic and would like to chat, please do join us! I’ll be online with a cup of tea and a comfy cushion, fervently crossing my fingers that the kids stay soundly asleep in bed……!

 

[For any novices at Twitter chats, don’t do what I did during my first ever Twitter chat – I spent half the chat in conversation with a lovely Twitter user, which was really interesting, but I didn’t realise that I was actually on my ‘Notifications’ page rather than on the main page containing all the tweets for the hashtag. I was therefore completely oblivious to the chat that was happening all around me!]

 

 

 

 

 

 


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Writing about psychotherapy – clients and therapists

There are a number of us – psychotherapy clients, that is – who write about what it is like being on ‘our side’ of the equation; what it is like sitting in that most uncomfortable of seats (though, if one is looking for at least physical comfort in the therapy room, this post describes what you need to do!).

But the blogging psychotherapist is a much rarer phenomenon; understandably, I think, in the light of the various difficulties and questions I raised in ‘Therapists who blog – I have some questions for you….!’. Nevertheless, just as therapists are fascinated by what goes on in their clients’ minds, many clients are equally fascinated about the contents of their own therapists’ minds, and in the absence of such concrete information, they are fascinated to know more about ‘how therapists think’. Of course, generalisations are as impossible to make about therapists, as they are about clients; but there is some comfort for clients, I think, in hearing other therapists’ views on questions they may feel unable to ask their own – “is it okay to be angry with you”, “what will you say or do if I tell you I love you”, “do you think about me outside of session”, “do you care about me”…to name but a few!

I follow two blogging psychotherapists – Dr Gerald Stein (now retired) and Martha Crawford from ‘What a Shrink Thinks‘ – and today I wanted to introduce you to a third, who I feel fortunate to have come across recently. Alison Crosthwait is the author of ‘The Good Therapists’ website and, as with the other two therapists I mentioned above, her writing is beautiful, moving and thought-provoking. She has published a wonderful book called ‘What it feels like to change‘ which is available through her website, and is a collection of some of her blog posts. The posts cover everything from ‘preparing’ for therapy sessions, to love and caring in therapy, to the process of understanding between therapist and client, to rage in therapy, and much more. I read it on my Kindle, and it is liberally highlighted – so much so that I really struggle to pick a sentence or paragraph to share here, but I will go with these two, which really spoke to me both in terms of my relationship with my husband, and my relationship with my therapist:

“Every human being struggles in intimate relationships. The ability to sustain this struggle is a sign of health. This involves the ability to recognize the humanity of another person even when they have deeply wounded us. The ability to ask for help. The ability to speak of our experience even when it feels risky. The capacity to tolerate the ways in which those close to us do not meet our needs”.

“I come in. I sit down. I say what is on my mind. And we talk. And I have to bear being who I am. Not the person I want to be, plan to be, strive to be. But me. And my therapist has to bear being who she is too. And who she is with me. And me with her. Owwww. It hurts to think about. It is so raw.”

And that’s one reason why the words of a writer-therapist can be so important to us, as clients – they write both as therapist and as client (or ex-client). They have been where we are, and can empathise with us, and we with them. They are the ‘proof’ that this process, which often seems so mysterious and indefinable, has worked for them and they see it working every day, for others like us. We can do it – even when we feel that we can’t. And we feel that we can’t, a lot.

But my favourite quote from Alison is this one, which I saw on ‘The Good Therapists’ Facebook page and which is by far the best description I have come across of what it feels like to change: “In order to change you need repeated exposure to your own coming apart, to the border between conscious and unconscious, and to the parts of yourself that you resist being with”. These questions of change and resistance have been ones I have grappled with immensely over the last few months, and I continue to go through that very painful (but rewarding) repeated exposure to my own coming apart.

Having enjoyed her book so much, I feel really honoured that Alison has included my blog in a ‘Psychotherapy Client Resource List’ that she has compiled for her new venture, ‘Therapy School’. Alison has kindly allowed me to share this fantastic reading list which you can find here (though it is normally part of her course), and I am very grateful to her for that. I really hope you find it useful – I have read a small number of these books so far, and have found them helpful and inspiring.

I am thankful for to all those – therapists and clients – who take ‘the risk’ of writing  about their thoughts and experiences, sometimes incredibly intimate ones. They have added something to my own and to others’ experiences of this amazing process of psychotherapy which, as Alison has written, is “not just about relief of suffering…it is about living a good life“.